Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 02:1 (Spring 2020)
Article: “Look Around You”: A Natural Theology Of The Sexes
Author: W. Brad Littlejohn

Eikon 2.1 (Spring 2020) p. 40

“Look Around You”:
A Natural Theology Of The Sexes

W. Brad Littlejohn

W. Brad Littlejohn is President of the Davenant Institute

What are men and women? What are men and women for? As this seems to be among the most urgent questions of our moral hour, you could pardon theologians and pastors for running off to answer it and leaving their notes behind. But before we try to answer such a weighty question, we must first ask ourselves another: “how do we know what men and women are for?”

For many Christians, the answer seems obvious: “it’s in the Bible, of course!” But decades of withering critical interrogation have left conservatives wringing their hands with uncertainty about how exactly a biblical narrative featuring polygamy, arranged marriages and bride-prices, Proverbs 31, Mary and Martha, deaconesses, head coverings, and Titus 2 can offer us a clear answer to the question of gender roles in the modern world. Even if we could fit all the biblical data into a set of tidy prescriptions, who’s to say that these still bind us today? After all, we don’t have slaves or cities of refuge anymore.

Faced with an inability to distill a dogma of gender roles that could rise above the vicissitudes of the Bible’s cultural history, conservative Christians have sometimes taken refuge in another answer: “by looking at God, of course.” God, after

Eikon 2.1 (Spring 2020) p. 41

all, never changes, so if the essence of male and female, the basic principle of complementarity, could be found in God himself, then it would be secure from every assault. With such an answer, I worry, the cure risks being worse than the disease. Rather than clarifying our understanding of sexuality by deriving it from God, we risk distorting our understanding of God by trying to import sexuality into it. In 2016, a fierce controversy flared up in evangelical ranks over the so-called “eternal subordination of the Son,” and many leading evangelical theologians were accused of stumbling unwittingly into a doctrine of the Trinity at odds with the Nicene Creed in their eagerness to find the foundations of male and female roles in the Holy Trinity.

Even setting aside worries about Nicene orthodoxy, the notion that the relationship of Father and Son is somehow the archetype of husband and wife never made any sense on the face of it to this author. Aren’t Father and Son both described in male terms? When the marriage metaphor is used of either Father or Son, aren’t they always presented as the bridegroom, and Israel or the Church as bride? And if the Father and Son are like husband and wife, w...